A New Goldmine of High Quality Blog Post Ideas

NOTE: There will be no blog post on Thursday, August 4 because I’m busy traveling. Stay tuned for the next Blogging Bookshelf post on Monday, August 8. Thanks!

I know we’ve all seen those “10 Ways to Get Blog Post Ideas” posts, and they usually rehash the same handful of tired ideas. This is different, I promise.

This idea-mining exercise involves Amazon. You’ve probably heard (and I mention it in my free 101 Ways to Battle Blogger’s Block ebook) that one way to use Amazon to get blog post ideas is to go look at the table of contents of books. You can see what topics are covered in the book, and there might be some topics that you hadn’t previously thought of that you can talk about on your blog.

But there’s another nifty tip. Here we’re going to go read through book or product reviews on Amazon to get ideas.

To illustrate my point here, let’s say that I have a blog about linguistics (I don’t). I ‘d search for “linguistics” on Amazon.com and choose one of the books that has a good number of reviews. I clicked on this one:

The book I clicked on

I then went down to the first review (Amazon sorts reviews so that the most helpful will be on top) and read it. Here it is (you can click it for a larger version):

The first review I looked at

Pretty much every sentence of that review contains at least one blog post idea. Let’s go through the first part, phrase by phrase.

“Saussure is important as a linguist”

I could write a short biography of the man. I could write a post that highlights his most important contributions to the world of linguistics. I could write a post refuting the statement, saying that Saussure isn’t in fact as important as everyone thinks he is. Knowing as I do that he was a father of modern linguistics (I studied linguistics in school), I could write about why he is considered a father of linguistics.

“(although many of his theories have since been put out to pasture)”

I could explain the origin of the phrase “put out to pasture.” I could write about his debunked theories (each one as a post by itself or all of them in a list post). I could write only about his theories that are still held to be valid today.

“but he is most important for his contributions to the theory of Structuralism”

I could write a post about what ideas *I* think are Saussure’s most important or influential. Or I could write a blog post about other linguists who have influenced the world outside of linguistics.

To conclude our little exercise here, let’s go over one more phrase from the second paragraph:

“This book is not particularly difficult; it’s a bit dry, but what can you expect from a linguistics class?”

I could write a post for linguistics teachers and call it “How to Make Your Linguistics Classes Less Boring.” I could write about the most boring linguistics books ever. I could write about the least boring, most interesting books about linguistics. Reading this could give me the idea to review any linguistics books I have lying around. And now that I think about it, I should write a post discussing “lying around” versus “laying around.”

So with those 4 snippets from one single review on Amazon, I gleaned enough ideas for at least 14 blog posts.

Not a bad use of a few minutes, eh?

Now consider that some books have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of reviews, and that there are millions of books in Amazon. Sweeeeet!

Go read a review of a book in your niche. How many blog post ideas can you come up with?

Great idea, not just for blog posts. Trawling those comment threads might provide ideas on stuff that the book talked about has missed – and that could prove a fertile starting ground for creating your own infoproduct on that topic.

Great idea, Tristan. I can never have enough article ideas as writing articles is my livelihood.

So I decided to do what you asked. I went to Amazon and picked the first book in one of my niches – A Wedding Planning Book.

Here some article titles I came up with immediately:

* Is Your Wedding Planner Book practical? (Small, has pockets, spiral bound, easy reference checklists)
* Planning Your Wedding, Where to Start
* When Should You Start Planning Your Wedding? (things you can start planning if it’s over a year away)
* What Wedding Essentials Should I Compare Prices On?
* A Great Gift For The Future Bride
* 5 Things Most Often Overlooked When Planning a Wedding

This was easy to do, even though I already have over 100 articles in this niche!

Hi Tristan!
I love innovative strategies for comping with quality blog post ideas. I think people should look more at books and book reviews for ideas – it’s one of the best ways to stand out from the crowd since it seems that people don’t make it inside libraries and bookstores as much as they used to. I think your idea really takes it to the next level because it takes us to a place where the ideas really are endless!

Tristan, Dennis’ thoughts crossed my mind too when leaving the earlier comments, but I thought that it wouldn’t be right on my part to ask for commentluv when I myself do not have it on my blog yet. I am stuck with an old version of WPmu that doesn’t support it, and can’t wait to have my new site up and ready to give some love to my readers.

Now this is quite a good idea. I think that coming up with ideas for posts is where I would really struggle, and one of the reasons I haven’t started a blog. I don’t want to put out crappy content, or just post once a month. So I have not started a blog.

That’s a great tip, and one I have never thought about. Since I bought my Kindle, I have been reading a lot of books and reviews of books. So, it’s almost hard to believe that I didn’t think about this one :)

Tristan: This blog post was a different from your usually “10 ways to get blog post idea’s”.

Never thought about reading reviews of popular books within my niche, but it sounds promising. I look forward to giving it a try and seeing what I can come up with. Now a days there really are many ways to come up with blog post idea’s.

If you say that your all burned out of idea’s then your not looking in the right places.

Absolutely right! Amazon can serve as a great resource when one is running out of ideas for blog posts. I mean, its like amazon is the biggest online resource for books, which can transform into topics for your blog posts. Apart from Amazon, a similar help can be GOOGLE Books.

Great idea, Tristan. Reading almost anything on your chosen topic will give you writing ideas, but this cuts it down to point form. Instead of reading someone else content and writing something similar in our own words, we just get the main points and create everything from our own heads. The articles inspired by this may have nothing to do with what the table of contents, preface or comments were going for. A great way to get article ideas when you already know your subject and need some new angles. Thanks for the post.

This is one valuable post you have Tristan. Haven’t really tried Goldmining in Amazon but I totally think this would be a very effective idea. Reading book reviews in Amazon is quite new but promising. Thank you for giving us an example. It is very helpful.

I think Amazon reviews are just perfect for bloggers to share more. I always make a point to read the reviews before buying and whether its possible or not for bloggers to write only high quality blog posts checking the right places for inspiration can generate a lot of blog posts.